This I Know To Be True

There is no such thing as an “inalienable right.”

This is the truth.

There are rights are fundamental, rights that people across time and space have considered necessary for one’s basic quality of life: The right to live, the right own property, the right to free will. These rights are said to be God given, or the basic tenets of social contract theory. Without these rights being upheld, society falls apart. The idea of “inalienable rights” was central to the abolition of slavery. All men are created equal, and as such, are entitled to the same rights as anyone else. These rights are the basic ingredients for anyone being a whole person.

But they are not inalienable. They are taken away from people all the time. This is the truth.

All over the world, from my backyard to the far reaches of Asia, from wealthy advanced countries to third world shit-holes, people’s basic rights are consistently and often violently denied them. Religious minorities are murdered for their faith. Women are gang-raped as military scare tactics. The poor and the addicted are evicted from the only places they can afford to live to make way for expensive, unattainable condos. People are treated like shit all the time, everywhere.

I believe it is my responsibility to do what I can to help other people live the best lives they can. Not my responsibility like “You, Deryck Lafortune, are charged with the safekeeping of humanity. You are like if Jesus came from Krypton.” No, this is my responsibility as a member of the global community. My responsibility as a child of God. My responsibility as my mothers son. It’s something I want and need to do.

This is the truth, at least to me.

So to these ends, I’ve decided to join the military. Now I know what you’re thinking. Whoa whoa whoa dummy, why the army? There are a lot of avenues you can take to improve the life of your fellow man without getting shot at, or tortured, or going batshit Deer Hunter style. You could volunteer at a soup kitchen. Or become a counselor. Or give out free handjobs. And I’ve definitely considered these options. I know some people who work in areas that I really respect, jobs that exemplify the kind of work I want to do. I know people who work in the worst neighbourhood in Canada, ensuring that the down-and-out and the drying-out have a safe and clean place of sanctuary. I know others who work as an educator teaching kids, kids that most have given up on as lost causes, with compassion and a firm fairness many aren’t receiving at home. I look at the work these people are doing, the selflessly noble way they are improving the lives of those around them, and it is inspiring. That’s what I want to do, that’s the kind of improvement I’m talking about. The difference though, the reason I want to sling bullets instead of kind words or encouraging, is a more difficult truth.

Armed conflict is a fact of life. A truth, if you will. I’ve heard people claim otherwise, spouting shit like “you can’t hug children with nuclear arms” to which I say this: Don’t be such a fucking hippie. Disarmament is obviously and ideal goal but until then, you cannot ignore that there are people and nations that use military action and armed force to violate the rights of people everywhere. And as long as people are using force to take advantage of people weaker than them, there will always be the need for someone to use force to defend them. Someone like myself. I may be able to teach people, or counsel people, or something along those lines, but I know that I can best help improve the lives of other in that capacity. I know it might be dangerous, I know my life may be threatened at times, but that is a risk I am willing to take.

It will probably be nothing. I will probably be at the back lines the whole time peeling potatoes, or touring with the USO. But I want to do my part. I want to be a real boy.

And that’s the truth.

An Open Letter To Bar Patrons

Dear People At The Bar I Work At: hello, I am your doorman. Sometimes I work at the front door checking your id but usually I am at the back door making sure no one sneaks in their buddy. You might remember me, I'm the guy in all black standing at the back of the club all night. I enjoy hanging out with you, I get to chat with people and get hit on by girls with daddy complexes and and get drunk after work for very cheap. Its good times, but there are a few of you that I have an issue with. I'd like to let you know whats going on, to prevent any unpleasantness later on.


Guy Trying To Give Me Twenty Dollars To Skip The Line: I get it. You want to look like the man in front of your date by pretending you have connections, so you shake my hand with four 5's in it and ask how long the wait is. Its exactly as long as it was before you greased my palm. We are at capacity, and if I let you in and we are audited, I get canned. So $20 isn't going to pay the money I could potentially lose in wages. If you slid $5000 into my hand, then we will talk.


Only Girl In Huge Group That Doesn't Have ID: Let me get this straight. You planned on going out drinking tonight, right? And you realize that if it wasn't for your huge fake cans, you would look like a twelve year old, right? The why wouldn't you bring your ID to the bar? I realize that belt you call a skirt doesn't have pockets, but I'm sure the huge hobo bag your fat friend is holding could hold your ID, your birth certificate, and possible your pediatrician to verify your age.


Girl Dancing On Table When "Ride A Horse, Save A Cowboy" Comes On: Do you know who does that? Strippers. It doesn't make you look fun and edgy, it makes you look drunk. And no, I'm not mad at you when I tell you if I see it again you're kicked out. Its just a hassle to clear the dance floor to get the paramedics in when you fall and land on your empty head.


Guy/Girl Wearing Sunglasses In The Bar: I realize those aviators or Ray-Bans or bug-eye face covers are part of the outfit, but you can't see anything and the way you are reeling around bumping into shit makes me think you are very drunk. Its distracting and i've got better things to do than break up a fight between you and one of the ten people you just caused to slosh their drink while you tried to get to the bar.


Guy Trying To Buy Me A Shot To Do With Your Buddies: Don't mistake my cordiality with friendliness. I am smiling at your drunken sexist banter because I am a host representing my employer, the bar. This doesn't mean we are friends, nor does it mean I will refrain from choking you out and dumping you in the alley if you get rowdy. Besides, I am working. How would you feel if I went to the cell phone store in the mall where you work and kept trying to hand you a Rocky Mtn. Bear Fucker?


Two Girls Exploring Your Sexuality By Grinding Together On The Dance Floor: Keep doing that. You are fine.


Guy Complaining About Having To Leave While He Still Has A Full Beer: Shut the fuck up. I've been standing for six hours watching idiots get drunk and cause trouble. I want to have a few beers, get paid, and meet that girl who slipped me her number earlier. I don't give a shit if you have most of your beer left; Last call was at 1:45 and its 2:20. Chug that fucking beer and get out or I am going to cut your throat and pour it directly into your stomach. If we can all be a little more concious of how we are behaving when we are out partying, we will all have more fun.


Sincerely, The Guy That Doesn't Want To Punch You In The Kidneys But Absolutely Will.

Death Race 3000

A few summers ago (God, has it been that long?) some of the guys from my rugby team and I went to San Francisco for a rugby tournament called Fogfest. It was during Pride Week and was a full on event, with after parties and brunches and even a little bit of rugby. Six of us drove down in a nineteen hour, two day journey filled wiith farts and dance music and about fifty milkshakes.

We got there late the night before the tournament and after getting lost in the worst neighbourhood in the city, eating some seriously questionable chinese food, and a fitful night of sleep, we were ready to play. The tourney was harlequin-style, which means that everyone who enters is mixed around and split up and assigned to different teams. As luck would have it, all of us who came down were put on different teams, assigned different jerseys and stuck in wth total strangers. I was looking forward to playing against the other guys on my team, but it was not to be so. Rugby is a hungry beast that feeds on injured players, and we fed her well. Twisted joints, black eyes, crippling butt cramps, our guys were dropping like flies, and by the end, there was only two of us still playing. After the final whistle blew, and after copious amounts of beer was drunk after at least one of us picked up a stranger, we called it a night and limped home.

We watched the parade the next day, and basically took it easy. The following day, the last day we were in town, Shoulders, Shayner and I decided to take in the sights, to see what San Fran had to offer us. We shopped, took pictures, accidentally wandered into the ghetto and saw someone puke blood, the usual tourist stuff. We figured it would be fun to take a trolley down to Fisherman's Wharf, a kind of street market/entertainment locale/tourist trap. We jumped on the next Wharf-bound streetcar, and were on our way.

Streetcars are San Fransisco icons, up there with the Golden Gate Bridge and Rice-a-Roni for images that evoke the character of the city. They are romantic, nostalgic things that hearken back to the "good old days". They are also horrible, horrible modes of transportation. Loud, rickety, given to sudden jolts of acceleration and stopping at a pace that makes me wonder if the driver is slowing down with his feet Flintstones style. The damn things were made out of wood, for Christ's sake! Conversation was impossible; emphatic gesturing and monkey-esque face pulling were the only was we could communicate, though there was pretty much only one thing we would be saying to each other if we could: This sucks.

We endured the ride for about fifteen minutes until the streetcar stopped and everyone piled off. Relieved to escape the death-trolley, we clambered of, only to be surprised by how few people there were at the wharf. And how far it was from the ocean. And how suspiciously like Chinatown it looked. Shayner asked the street car driver, "Hey, um, is this Fisherman's Wharf?"

"Nope, sorry, this is Chinatown. There's something wrong with the streetcar, it's gotta be taken in. Bye!" and with that, the car took off back up the hill and around a corner.

Fuck.

We were stuck. We didn't know where we were, or how we had gotten there. None of us had cell phones, and everyone one we asked for directions sneered and muttered things that sounded suspiciously like "goddam tourists", "Leave me alone or else" and "You're dead meat, Deryck." I didn't know what we were going to do. Then our knight in shining armour showed up.

Actually, it was a knight in a shining white limousine. This was no pussy limousine either, but a big long prom-night special. Pulling a tire-screaming u-turn, it pulled up in front of us with one wheel on the sidewalk. "Where you guys headed?" came from the driver, yelling to be heard over the music.
"Uuuhhh, Fisherman's Wharf?"
"Get in, three bucks each!"
"Uuuhh, ok?"
We all piled in, because really, who wouldn't? It's a limo! Movie stars ride in limos! Diplomats ride in limos! Pornos are filmed in limos! We were ballers, and the idea of riding in a limo without having to rent a tux or buy a corsage pushed all childhood warnings from our parents about taking rides from strangers out of our heads. I mean, what's the worse that could happen?

I thought we were going to die. As soon as we got in the locks clicked down, and the driver took off like we were being chased by the cops. (which I realize now may have been the case). The driver, blasting gangster rap out of the speakers, was flying down San Fran's trademark steep hills at breakneck speed. Blowing through yellow and red lights, swerving around traffic, I was convinced he was going to drive us to a secluded lot somewhere and steal our wallets or our kidneys or both. I didn't want to be stranded in America without a wallet, and I definitely didn't want to wake up in a bathtub full of ice in an abandoned motel. I was crapping my pants, and my buddies were doing no better. Shoulders had his hands dug into the cushions trying (in vain) to prevent his head from smashing into the car's ceiling everytime we launched over an intersection Starsky-and-Hutch style. Shayner I think was weeping, but there was a very good chance he had just been hit in the face with one of the highball glasses that were flying around the cabin. This was it. This was the end. The car screeched to a halt, and I prepared myself for the worse.

We were in Fisherman's Wharf. We had transversed what I found out later to be a good portion of the city in about fifteen minutes, due to some seriously reckless driving and an elastic understanding of traffic laws. "Nine bucks!" the driver yelled from the front. We threw wads of cash at him and scrambled out, too relieved to be alive to feel embarrassed about the wet spots spreading on the front of our pants.

Speedies R.I.P.

Speedies Skateshop is a small, old-school skateboard shop. It was here that I had my first, and best, steady job. Working every other day after school and one day each weekend, I suppose it was here that I got my first taste of responsibility, of working for my money and all that, but that wasn't the only thing I learned at Speedies. I also learned to put together boards, and how to build ramps. I learned the best way to convince someone that they are a size ten shoe, not a size fourteen. I learned how to give some kid's parents so much of a discount that I had to add money from my pocket to the till, because every day that kid came in with his ratty second hand clothes and beat up shoes and talked to me about how cool skateboarding is. I learned how to light farts. I learned how to griptape a board so that I cut off all the excess in one piece, like peeling a mandarin orange. I learned these things and a thousand more, but most of all I learned that sometimes your most important family members aren't even related to you, that sometimes you can't stand to be in the same room as someone and still be willing to stand up for them in a fist fight.

Speedies was right in the middle of Fraser Highway, located in the heart of Downtown Aldergrove. If Aldergrove could be said to have a downtown. If it could be said to have a heart. But if it could, we were right in the thick of it. The commercial life blood of Aldergrove flowed around and over and through us, pedestrians and passers-through and visitors from the nearby border crossing. Sandwiched between a pizza joint and a hair salon, it was in a storefront that was previously a coffee shop, an antiques store, and a used clothing store. There was no a/c, or really ventilation at all. When kids were skating the ramp in the during the summer, the heat and the smell of sweat and pizza would become so strong and oppressive I would spend pretty much the entire day sitting on the concrete barrier outside working on my tan and only going inside when a customer showed up. Not that they minded. Almost all of our customers were kids from Aldergrove, brothers and classmates and friends all. If you skateboarded and lived in Aldergrove, I knew you. I knew where you got your board from. I knew who your favorite skater was. I knew your mom was a drunk, or that you had a hot sister but that no-one was allowed to say so (at least, when you were around). I knew you.

Runnign a skateboard shop in a small town is different than other businesses there. It's not like a barbershop or a video store or a porno shop, where people in the town need your services and only have to pick which shop to go to. There was no rich pool of skateboarders clamoring for retail oppurtunities, so we created one. We organized contests, downhill races, scavenger hunts. We successfully lobbied the city to build a skatepark. We did skate trips to Kelowna, Portland, San Fran. After a while, it stopped being a business to many people (myself included) and started being a lifestyle. We were like a gang from The Warriors, going to skateparks in packs, dressing the same, skating the same. Our reputations preceded us. People knew when the Speedies Crew rolled into town, all fire and noise and flying bottles. Once, when skating a park in North Van this little kid came up to a few of us and asked "Hey, you're the Speedies guys, right?"
"Yeah dude."
"What's that shop like?"
"You've never been?"
"Nope."
"Then how did you know who we are?"
"You're the Speedies guys. Everyone knows who you are."

Being a part of Speedies coloured everything I do, made me the person I am today. That shop is in all the posts on this site, in the clothes that I wear and things that I say. It's difficult to accurately convey how I feel. I could tell you stories. I could tell you about the time that we held a contest to make the best spot in Aldergrove, which basically meant cementing up or chopping down some street barricade or stair railing to make it fun to skate. I could tell you about the time we went on a road trip in two vans back when Mcdonalds had 39 cent burgers. We ended up pooling our money and buying fifty burgers so we could whip them at each other while barreling down the freeway. I could even tell you about the time we tied up this kid Demon in the back of the shop. He hated red peppers, so naturally we were trying to force him to eat one. This escalated to us tying him to a chair and holding the pepper in front of his face, telling him we would release him if he just took one bite, which he refused to do. Afte about twenty minutes we got bored and I had customers to help, so we left him bound in the back room while the kids sat up front watching videos and I rang in sales. His pleas for release eventually became shouted demands, which happen to be bad for business, so I sent a kid back to untie him. Instead, this kid told Demon to shut the hell up and kicked the back of the chair. Kicked it a little too hard, unfortunately, for it tipped Demon over face first and unable to brace himself, as someone had cruely bound his arms. The pepper that had been left on his lap rolled onto the floor as he fell, and managed to perfectly position itself so that he fell open mouth-first onto it. He ended up taking quite a hefty bite from it.

I could tell you all these stories and a thousand more, and I couldn't get it right. I realize now, reading over this, that it is kind of like when someone is in love. The love they rave about, the feeling that raises their sun and nourishes their soul, is incomprehensible to some and boring to most. It's just a store, right? Maybe to you, but to me and the kids that grew up there and got in trouble there and hid out there, that's akin to saying it's just a church. She's just your mother.

A few days ago I went to a party at Speedies. It is closing. The guy who owns it, a good friend of mine with the same name and about a hundred times more character, is moving on to bigger and better things. I'd say it was the end of an era but that term is so cheesy, something said when Friends ended or when they stopped making the Camaro. It's just over. It went out in true Speedies fashion, with a death metal band and kids pissing off the roof and cops and smokes and laughs. I guess you could say it died the way it lived.

In The Ghettoooo

In Vancouver, there is an area called the Downtown Eastside. Not merely a geographic location, this name is synonymous with poverty, and suffering, and addiction. Home to controversial and innovative programs like safe injection sites and the NAOMI project, it also has some of the highest addiction rates per capita of any region in North America.

This is where I live.

I live in a charming little bachelor pad above the Met, a "sports bar" that turns into a shitty club on the weekend. There are about 50 apartments in the building, all about the same size, which is approximately a hundred square feet. It's tiny.
Now, something that I've read about a lot, especially recently, is people in the DTES being evicted from their hotel rooms. These are low income people, usually recovering or current addicts, that live in Single Resident Occupancy rooms like the Balmoral or the Patricia. Many of the times these poor souls will be evicted from their hotels en mass with something like thirty minutes of notice, either because the building has been condemned or it is being torn down to build something better (and way more expensive). It's illegal, but because these people are living hand to mouth, legal recourse is usually out of the question unless an advocacy group steps up, and in the DTES, these groups are spread pretty thin. I've always pitied those that have to live in places like that. Trapped in poverty, they are often not unwilling but unable to escape their destitution. To me, living in an SRO was the last step on a downward slope that usually ended up on the street but rarely end with moving up and out.

So imagine my chagrin when in my mail I recently recieved a survey asking for the opinion of peopel living in SROs. How would I know? I live in an apartment, not a hotel. Sure it's small, and I guess it wouldn't acutally be fit for more than one person to live in, and theres no closet,but it's certainly not a hotel room, for Christ's sake. I showed the survey to my landlord, certain he would get a kick out of the obvious mistake.

"Well, technically, this is a hotel."

"WHAT!?"

"Yeah, the rooms are designated as SROs by the city, but they're pretty big as far as the average Downtown Eastside hotel rooms go."

Fuck. Great. Well, I guess it's not that bad. Maybe I've had a skewed view of what SRO life is like. Perhaps I've demonized something that I don't necessarily know enough about. After all, I've lived here for about three months and while it's been interesting, it hasn't been terrible...

Two days ago some dickhead slashed the soft top on my car not to steal anything, but to have a place to smoke meth in peace. I know this because in a rage, I started sweeping out the garbage they had left strewn all over the place onto the street, and I cut myself on the pipe they left hidden on the seat. Last night this junkie peice of shit pulled a knife on me and demanded my wallet a block from my place, and thank fully couldn't keep up when I took off.

I'm getting the hell out of Dodge.

A Long Time Ago, in a Skatecamp Far Far Away...

We're doing a lot of tackling in rugby right now, lots of smashing into each other from the front, side, and rear, lots of learning how to offload and learning how to fall and most of all, learning how fucking much rugby can hurt. The question I seem to hear the most when we are doing tackling (other than "is it all right if I just watch this drill?") is what to do about the big guys. Rugby is known for producing some giant brutish louts, man-tanks that eat nails and shave with an axe, and for guys that measure their waist in inches rather than feet, these guys can be pretty intimidating. The answer to this question is always the same: Get low. It doesn't matter how big a guy is, if you can get his feet together, he's going down. Rather hard, I might say. It's kind of like a tree falling. But more so, it's like this;

When I was in high school, for grades 10-12 I was a summer camp counselor. And I was a camp counselor at the coolest summer camp around. This wasn't Camp Okey-Dokey, or Camp Wimpyhanna. This was Young Life Skate Camp, a week and a half of kids bombing around on skateboards, lighting farts on fire, and pissing out the window because the only bathrooms in the camp were a ten minute walk away. It was held at a giant Mennonite camp in Hope (which meant no meat with the meals, but everyone smuggled in beef jerky). There were two huge indoor parks, a pool, an outdoor street course, a volleyball court, and about a million square kilometres of forest. Pros came to the camp, and they would spend the entire time just hanging out with us regular kids, showing us crazy old school tricks and calling us by name. It was great times and for a lot of the kids who went, it was ten days when they could leave behind the sense of ennui that seems to have become the tapestry of their lives. These were kids who for the most part came from single parent homes or home living below the poverty line, kids who never really fit in with the team atmosphere of organized sports but had too much energy to sit on their ass all day. There were a hundred and eighty of these whirling hormonal dervishes at the camp, split up into fifteen cabins, with a counselor in each one.

As I mentioned before, I was one of these counselors. But being a counselor at skate camp was different at other camps. Being a counselor at skate camp meant organizing trucker parties in your cabin, where the price of admission was allowing us to draw a huge handle bar mustache on you in permanent marker.
Being a counselor meant dressing up like Boss Humungous for the skateboard jousts and coming seriously close to putting out a kids eye with one of your obscenely large shoulder spikes.
It meant convincing the kids in your cabin to raid the camp kitchen at night after you overheard that they were getting cake for the next nights dessert. It also meant that after realizing everyone grabbed a cake, you had to force the kids to eat all of them to get rid of the evidence.

But probably the best part about being a camp counselor at skate camp was that you got to take part in planning the day's activities. And the second year I was there, we planned the best (and arguably the most dangerous) game that camp has ever seen. Remember I was talking about wrapping up a guy's legs to get him down? Well, we took it to the next level.

Do you remember the Battle of Hoth, in The Empire Strikes Back ? The one in the snow, with the AT-AT's and the snowspeeders? Well, we wanted to do our best to re-create that. We built plywood AT-AT shells with handles on the inside and a slot cut in the front, that two guys could get in. We tied ropes to bicycles and milk crates to the ropes to make snowspeeders with the tether cannons, just like in the movie. We even got stilts to re-create the AT-STs. This was going to be the most elaborate game played. Unfortunatly, it was also the most poorly planned.

The idea was that the Empire guys (the guys in the wooden AT-AT's and the stilt AT-ST's) had to make across a soccer field into the Rebel base, basically a big spray painted circle. The Rebels had to defend this area, using their bicycle snowspeeders and water balloons filled with flour. They could use the ropes to trip up the walkers, you see? Well, before we even started we ran into trouble. Turns out no-one knows how to walk on stilts. So, instead of abandoning the idea, someone came up with the brilliant idea of duct-taping the stilts to the kid's legs. It worked, but it also means that if they did fall over, they were falling from about three feet higher than they normally would. With that problem solved, we got under way.

the kids started out slow, especially the four legged AT-AT's. Turns out, the slot we cut in the shell was way too high and way too narrow to see out of. They were wandering around blind, risking getting hit with flour bomb to lift up the shell and get their bearings.
Turns out the flour bombs were a little more to be reckoned with than we thought. None of the balloons were filled up enough to break when they hit a person. Instead, they just became rock hard projectiles that left welts when thrown hard enough. And believe me, they were thrown plenty hard.

The biggest problem, however, were the tethers. Remeber in the movie when the speeder flew around and around the the big AT-AT's with a rope attached, tangling up it's legs and causing it to crash to the ground? That was the idea here, but what we didn't realize (at least not until the first screams of pain and surprise) was that a) the guys in the AT-AT's couldn't see what was coming and hence didn't know when they were going to be tripped and b) even if they knew they were going down, because they were holding the shells, there was nothing they could do except hit the ground. The "snowspeeders" didn't have it any better. In the movie, the tether detaches from the speeder after felling the walker; in real life, as soon as the slack on th rope was taken up, the bike would stop and the kid on it would go right over the handle bars.

It was a fucking disaster. It was like Lord of the Flies with robots and stilts. Kids were bleeding, staggering around like footage of shell-shocked war victims. The guys on bikes soon learned it was easier (and less painful) to just abandon the bikes and walk around pushing over the AT-AT's. The ones with stilts taped to their legs started kicking at the other kids to avoid being toppled. Turns out if you fall over while strapped to your stilts, its impossible to get up with out help, and on this day it was pretty much every man for themselves. I tried to wade, to pull out the wounded. I got hit with two flour balloons and tripped by a bike before I decided it wasn't worth it. Fuck these kids. I'm going swimming.

For a Friends Amusement

You know who you are.

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net